(To all: Today's essay is on the long side, but it's got important information in it that I spent a lot of time gathering - hence the delay in getting it out to you. If you can't read the whole thing, please don't miss the conclusion. It's important.) First of all, let me just say how proud I am to be Irish today. Check out this story from today's Boston Globe: "US plane damaged in Irish protest" As you may know, Sinn Fein is gaelic for "Ourselves, Alone," a reference to the sovereignty of the Irish people, who know a thing or two about standing down the Empire. I'm glad to see Sinn Fein and the Irish Green Party working in coalition to keep American warplanes off of what ought to be neutral turf. Of course, the UK, Ireland's old nemesis, is America's junior partner in the full-court press to invade Iraq, so maybe it's not at all surprising that Irish nationalists and progressives are joining together to resist Bush's war plan. Today's New York Times has an obituary on page A23 for a man named Edward Korry, who died yesterday at the age of 81. According to the headline of the obituary, Korry was "Falsely Tied to Chile Coup." It still continues to amaze me how frank the obituaries are about U.S. foreign policy - as opposed to other parts of the paper, where you might expect it. You may remember that in my first e-mail, "They're Lying to Us Again," I pointed out that in the obituary of Globe reporter J. Randolph Ryan, there was a pretty candid condemnation of our government's dirty wars in Central America in the 1980s. Some of the most horrendous human rights abuses known to man were committed in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, all well-known to Washington - and usually supported with arms and money. It was the price we paid to keep "Communism" out of "our back yard." Korry's obit in today's Times is no different. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/30/obituaries/30KORR.html Check out this passage, which details the overthrow (and assassination) of Chile's democratically-elected President, Salvador Allende, in 1973: "President Richard M. Nixon, like John F. Kennedy and Johnson before him, feared the spread of communism in Latin America. Like his predecessors, Nixon tried to undermine Allende, who had been a source of anxiety in Washington since the early 1960's, when his presidential aspirations became obvious. Suspicions that the Central Intelligence Agency helped to orchestrate the coup surfaced in part because the columnist Jack Anderson published, in 1972, documents from the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation showing that the company had worked with the C.I.A. to undermine Allende. Later, Senate investigators disclosed that in 1970 President Nixon had ordered Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence, to try to keep Allende from assuming power. Congressional investigators eventually established, after weeks of hearings before the two Senate committees in 1973, that the C.I.A. had used I.T.T. as a conduit to funnel at least $8 million to anti-Allende groups over the years." Recently declassified records indicate that the chief architect of the coup against Allende, whose name is conspicuously absent from Korry's obit, was Nixon's National Security Adviser and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He was in the news recently because President Bush asked him to head up the inquiry into the Sept. 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He eventually declined the invitation, after members of Congress asked that he reveal the names of the clients of his consulting business, Kissinger Associates. I bring this up because our President made a lot of claims about the role of the United States in the world the other night in his speech, and I wrote yesterday that someone has to hold him accountable for the truthfulness of those statements. I'm going to try a little experiment, and I hope you'll find it enlightening. I'm going to juxtapose President Bush's claims about the U.S. government's role in world affairs with descriptions of the Nixon administration's campaign to overthrow Salvador Allende, elected by the people of Chile to be their president. ******************************************** "Chile holds a special place in the annals of American foreign policy. During the mid-1970s, the country that poet Pablo Neruda described as 'a long petal of sea, wine, and snow' became the subject of international scandal. News reports revealed that the CIA had conducted massive clandestine operations to undermine the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and help bring the military to power in 1973. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's embrace of the Pinochet regime, despite its ongoing atrocities, prompted Congress to pass the very first laws establishing human rights as a criterion for US policy abroad. The CIA's covert operations and the debate over US policy toward Pinochet generated a slew of secret documents. So, too, did the 1973 murder in Chile of two US citizens, freelance writers Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, as well as the brazen 1976 car bombing in Washington that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American associate, Ronni Karpen Moffitt. The Clinton administration's special review carried the promise of finally declassifying these records and answering the outstanding questions that haunt this shameful era." ("Still Hidden: A Full Record of What the US Did in Chile," Peter Kornbluh, The Washington Post, 24 October 1999) "Our war against terror is a contest of will, in which perseverance is power. In the ruins of two towers, at the western wall of the Pentagon, on a field in Pennsylvania, this nation made a pledge, and we renew that pledge tonight: Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men; free people will set the course of history." (President George W. Bush, Jan. 28, 2003) "President Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger, who served as his national security advisor and Secretary of State, supported a right-wing coup in Chile in the early 1970s, previously declassified documents show." ("U.S. Will Release Files on Crimes Under Pinochet," New York Times, Dec. 2, 1998) "We have the terrorists on the run, we're keeping them on the run. One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice." (President George W. Bush, Jan. 28, 2003) "But many of the actions of the United States during the 1973 coup, and much of what American leaders and intelligence services did in liaison with the Pinochet Government after it seized power, remain under the seal of national security. The secret files on the Pinochet regime are held by the C.I.A., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, the National Archives, the Presidential libraries of Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, and other Government agencies. According to Justice Department records, these files contain a history of human rights abuses and international terrorism." ("U.S. Will Release Files on Crimes Under Pinochet," New York Times, Dec. 2, 1998) ******************************************** "During interrogation she was slapped all over the body and punched in the face, breasts and abdomen. She was kicked on the buttocks and backs of the thighs, usually while lying down. On one occasion when she was in her cell an interrogator seized her hair and banged the back and right side of her head against the wall. She did not lose consciousness. She was electrically tortured. She was stretched out on a metal bed with hands and feet bound. She was given shocks on the temples, chest and heel. A metal object was applied to her vaginal labia and she was electrically tortured there, but the device was not forced inside. On about the eighth day she was sexually tortured. She was stripped naked and her blind-fold was removed. She was made to lie on the floor then kicked and raped by four men, one of whom subjected her to fellatio. This type of torture lasted about an hour. They also threatened to violate her with a dog and to lock her in a room with rats. She was told the man she had been living with had been killed. She was then taken into a room where a corpse lay with its face covered and told it was this man. She knew it was not however, as the body's height and build were different from his. The corpse had been split open down the middle and there were wounds on the abdomen. It was beginning to decompose, and she was forced to lie right by it facing it. At one stage the towel was removed from its decomposing face. On five occasions she was taken into a small, very hot room and left there for a few minutes. She had a burning feeling all over but did not think she actually was burned. She was taken into a room full of rats, but managed to jump up on a bed and so escaped from them. She was threatened: the interrogators said they would kill her, the man she had been living with and her parents. She was also insulted and called a whore. ("Chile: Evidence of torture: an Amnesty International report," London, Amnesty International Publications, 1983, pp. 35-37.) It was only when Mario Fernández saw the headline, "Pinochet Under Arrest," that the dam broke and he finally found it possible to talk about the beatings, the electric shocks, the cigarette burns, the terrible sense of humiliation and alienation. "My body froze; I had an intense allergic reaction, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," said Mr. Fernández, trembling at the memory. He ran to his wife and wept on her shoulder, and, at long last, took her advice to seek therapy. "I needed to talk about the terror inside that hood they put on me, of not knowing whether they would kill me from one minute to the next," he said. Mr. Fernández is not alone in the anguished release that has come with the arrest of Gen. Augusto Pinochet in London on human rights charges in October 1998… Although no accurate count exists, at least 40,000 Chileans were tortured under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 until 1990, people who had been members of leftist parties, unions, student groups or even merely bureaucrats in the Socialist government of President Salvador Allende Gossens. Some were tortured for information, some to drive them into exile, some purely to intimidate them. In a systematic campaign run by the armed forces and the police at special sites across the country, they were raped, beaten, shocked, hooded, drugged, held under water and deprived of sleep; they were subjected to mock executions and months of solitary confinement." ("Pinochet Case Reviving Voices of the Tortured," New York Times, January 3, 2000) "We seek peace. We strive for peace." (President George W. Bush, Jan. 28, 2003) "From 1970 to 1973, the United States sought to overthrow the government of Chile and its democratically elected president, Dr. Salvador Allende, whom it deemed a Marxist threat to U.S. interests. Under orders from President Richard M. Nixon, the CIA mounted a full-tilt covert operation to keep Allende from taking office and, when that failed, undertook subtler efforts to undermine him. Those efforts "never really ended," the CIA's director of operations at the time, Thomas Karamessines, later told Senate investigators. Twenty-five years ago last week, on Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military seized power, The junta, under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ruled until 1990. Its death squads murdered more than 3,000 people, and it jailed and tortured thousands more. Chile is still trying to come to terms with the damage done to its democratic institutions. (Tim Weiner, "How the CIA Took Aim at Allende," New York Times, September 12, 1998) "America is a strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers." (President George W. Bush, Jan. 28, 2003) "In a famous expression of his contempt for democracy, Kissinger once observed that he saw no reason why a certain country should be allowed to "go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." The country concerned was Chile, which at the time of this remark had a justified reputation as the most highly evolved pluralistic democracy in the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas. The pluralism translated, in the years of the Cold War, into an electorate that voted about one-third conservative, one-third socialist and Communist, and one-third Christian Democratic and centrist. This had made it relatively easy to keep the Marxist element from having its turn in government, and ever since 1962 the CIA had--as it had in Italy and other comparable nations--largely contented itself with funding the reliable elements. In September 1970, however, the left's candidate actually gained a slight plurality of 36.2 percent in the presidential elections. Divisions on the right, and the adherence of some smaller radical and Christian parties to the left, made it a moral certainty that the Chilean Congress would, after the traditional sixty-day interregnum, confirm Dr. Salvador Allende as the next president. But the very name of Allende was anathema to the extreme right in Chile, to certain powerful corporations (notably ITT, Pepsi-Cola, and the Chase Manhattan Bank) that did business in Chile and the United States, and to the CIA. This loathing quickly communicated itself to President Nixon. He was personally beholden to Donald Kendall, the president of Pepsi-Cola, who had given him his first international account when, as a failed politician, he had joined a Wall Street law firm. A series of Washington meetings, within eleven days of Allende's electoral victory, essentially settled the fate of Chilean democracy. After discussions with Kendall, with David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, and with CIA director Richard Helms, Kissinger went with Helms to the Oval Office. Helms's notes of the meeting show that Nixon wasted little breath in making his wishes known. Allende was not to assume office. "Not concerned risks involved. No involvement of embassy. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary. Full-time job--best men we have.... Make the economy scream. 48 hours for plan of action." ("The Case Against Henry Kissinger" Harper's Magazine, March, 2001) ******************************************** "On November 9, 1970, Henry Kissinger authored National Security Council Decision Memorandum 93, which reviewed policy toward Chile in the immediate wake of Salvador Allende's confirmation as president. Various routine measures of economic harassment were proposed (as per Nixon's instruction to "make the economy scream"), with cutoffs in aid and investment. More significantly, Kissinger advocated that "close relations" be maintained with military leaders in neighboring countries, in order to facilitate both the coordination of pressure against Chile and the incubation of opposition within the country. In outline, this prefigures the disclosures that have since been made about Operation "Condor," a secret collusion among military dictatorships across the hemisphere, operated with the United States government's knowledge and indulgence. The actual overthrow of the Allende government in a sanguinary coup d'etat took place on September 11, 1973, while Kissinger was going through his own Senate confirmation process as secretary of state. He falsely assured the Foreign Relations Committee that the United States government had played no part in the coup. From a thesaurus of hard information to the contrary, one might select Situation Report No. 2, from the Navy Section of the United States Military Group in Chile and written by U.S. Naval Attache Patrick J. Ryan. Mr. Ryan describes his close relationship with the officers engaged in overthrowing the government, hails September 11, 1973, as "our. D-Day," and observes with satisfaction that "Chile's coup de etat [sic] was close to perfect." Or one may peruse the declassified files on "Project FUBELT"--the code name under which the CIA, in frequent contact with Kissinger and the 40 Committee,(1) conducted covert operations against the legal and elected government of Chile. What is striking, and what points to a much more direct complicity in individual crimes against humanity, is the microscopic detail in which Kissinger kept himself informed, after the coup, of Augusto Pinochet's atrocities. On November 16, Assistant Secretary of State Jack B. Kubisch delivered a detailed report on the Chilean junta's execution policy, which, as he notes to the new secretary, "you requested by cable from Tokyo." The memo goes on to enlighten Kissinger in various ways about the first nineteen days of Pinochet's rule. Summary executions during that period, we are told, totaled 320." ("The Case Against Henry Kissinger" Harper's Magazine, March, 2001) ******************************************** "But while Chileans are learning about their dark history from the US documents, American citizens are learning almost nothing about their own government's actions. Among more than 25,000 pages released to date, there is not a single page of the thousands of CIA, National Security Council (NSC) or National Security Agency (NSA) records on US policy and operations to bring down Allende and help Pinochet consolidate his rule. This documentation includes the files of the CIA's covert 'Task Force on Chile', planning papers from the Nixon White House, records of US material support for the DINA, and intelligence documents on the Horman and Letelier-Moffitt cases. That such records exist is beyond dispute. As the subject of repeated controversy over the years, the US role in Chile has generated congressional inquiries, murder investigations, criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits - not to mention hundreds of requests under the Freedom of Information Act. These have yielded extensive information (which I have spent almost 20 years compiling and analyzing) about what still is hidden." ("Still Hidden: A Full Record of What the US Did in Chile," Peter Kornbluh, The Washington Post, 24 October 1999) Some may be concerned that I'm tying documentation about the crimes of the Nixon administration to a speech that was made just the other night. Let me respond to that: first of all, Bush's statements about our country are nearly identical to claims that have been made by statesmen, Republican and Democrat, since the founding of this country. Likewise, there are many episodes, like the overthrow of Allende, that seriously call into question the U.S. government's claim to be a force for human rights and democracy in the world. The death of Ambassador Korry is simply an occasion to point this out. Also - on May 23, 2000, when Bush was running for president, he appeared before the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. with a select group people he had chosen to advise him on foreign policy. Among them was Henry Kissinger. |
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